Why Filipinos go hungry

A VENDOR sells fresh vegetables at Balintawak Market in Quezon City. ROMAN PROSPERO A look at a failed land reform program

Although the Philippines imported 250,000 metric tons (MT) of rice last June, the Department of Agriculture (DA) insisted the country is on track to achieve 100 percent rice sufficiency status by 2020.

In fact, the Philippine Rice Research Institute (Philrice) and the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) believe the Philippines should soon be an exporter of the staple in Asia.

According to Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel Piñol, the Philippines is 96 percent rice sufficient and that the remaining four percent amounts to a deficiency equal to 400,000 metric tons.

But assertions on the Philippines no longer requiring to import rice have been around for decades and are considered mere talk. Filipino farmers, after all, are not getting any younger, their average age being 57 years, according to government data.

Land reform, too, is considered a failure and has forced policymakers to wonder if the Philippines still has arable land left.

With these issues hanging over our collective head, the goal of achieving rice sufficiency and food security without importing the commodity needs a reality check at the very least.

Here, the Daily Tribune revisits an interview with former Rep. Jose “Peping” Cojuangco in 2014 when the Philippines imported 1.7 million tons of rice under then-President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III.

Cojuangco claimed at the timed that agricultural land had been rendered unproductive by the flawed implementation of agrarian reform.

He warned that only 5 percent of global rice production was actually for sale to big importing countries like China and the Philippines.

Cojuangco painted a bleak scenario of scant rice available for importation that only the richest countries can afford to buy.

“The basic problem is the implementation of laws, both the Land Reform Code and the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law (CARL) of Cory,” said Cojuangco, referencing his sister, the late President Corazon Aquino, mother of Noynoy.

“The focus is on land distribution even up to now. President (Noynoy) Aquino made special mention of it again (land distribution) when there’s no survey at all, or a report, on how land reform (fared) in relation to its objective, which is not just break up the land and give them to small landowners.”

Cojuangco said there is no way the Philippines can be “efficiently productive if we break up our lands,” citing the case of the United States which has “induced” small farms into organizing themselves into “economic-sized farms” and providing them incentives.

Cojuangco claimed he has always been a farmer at heart and that even as local government head and as legislator, he pushed for agricultural reforms to boost production and uplift the lives of small farmers.

Cojuangco said he cannot keep his silence while staring at the prospect of the demise of the agricultural sector, with broken-up land being sold by farmer-beneficiaries for conversion into commercial land with the aid of unscrupulous personnel of the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR).

It is only now that I speak like this because the deed is done. They have our land placed under land reform. But we must look at the future now,” Cojuangco said.

“If I just fold my hands now knowing what I know, that means I am giving up and allow the Filipino people to go hungry. We can still do something. Let us implement the land reform program the way it should be implemented.”

Cojuangco also said that as congressman, he authored in 1963 a law creating the Philippine Agricultural Marketing News Service. It was never implemented although it was a “service necessary in land reform.”

The agricultural news service, he said, was intended to guide small farmers into increasing their production and getting a fair price for their produce, thereby encouraging them to plant more even if the guidance provided them in the past by the big landowners had been removed by land reform.

Coupled with public and private sector support for post-harvest facilities like drying and milling, the news service was supposed to undertake a study of the whole country, its markets, and the supply and demand.

He said the service would have told farmers in Region 3, for example, to plant tomatoes in one area and tobacco in another so that farmers are assured of selling something at harvest time.

Left to fend for themselves by the DAR and the DA sans the support system and the marketing skill necessary to get ahead, the small farmers, even those who planted high-value crops, were worse off, heavily indebted with no market for their produce and their harvest exploited by middlemen offering prices below their cost of production, he said.

“In America, their own Agricultural Marketing Service from where I patterned ours in 1963, gives a quota to every state divided into towns planting specific crops. In Virginia, for example, the service would say this is your quota for corn,” Cojuangco said.

“As long as the farmer meets the quota, he is guaranteed a price by the US government. If the market price gets lower, the government buys the produce from the farmer at the agreed fair price. No losses,” he said.

“If you exceed the quota, you can do whatever you want with the excess. This was done to all crops like wheat, corn, oats and even tobacco,” he said.

Cojuangco lamented that the support systems for small farmers whose passage in Congress he helped accomplish all came to naught.

“I guess they didn’t understand it or they did not care. The people that ran and are running DAR just did not care because as long as they distributed land, they considered themselves successful. It didn’t matter to them and it does not matter to them now if land reform improves or not improve the quality of life of farmer-beneficiaries.”

“The only DAR secretary who ordered a survey on how farmer-beneficiaries were doing was Secretary Ernesto Garilao during the Ramos presidency. The reason in my asking for such a survey was because our tenants came back to us after they were given the land and asked that they revert to being tenants. Most of them lost the land given them.”

To Cojuangco, Hacienda Luisita has given the most land to beneficiaries of some 15,000 hectares, including rice fields that were promptly sold and converted for commercial and residential purposes.